HA!!! Great, Dave! Thanks!

I guess a relationship with money is really a relationship with the people and companies who collect it. I'd love to be able to tell all of them "GO AWAY!!!" and just live off the land in the woods somewhere.

Reply #25 - You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets

I just researched the 10 Commandments, and what you have listed as your second commandment is not what I have found. This is what I have found for the second commandment - "You shall not take the name of the Lord, you God, in vain."

My children. :)

That was Jesus' point of view on the first and second most important commandments. Not the order in which Moses received them.

If taken in the context of oneness, it also dovetails with what he said about whatever we do, or don't do to the least among us, for good or ill, we do or don't do to God.

Being in the 21st century, I like to think of it in terms of quantum consciousness. There's only one consciousness and it permeates existence (or is in fact existence?) at its most fundamental layer. A portion of that consciousness shines through in all us.

We tend to think of ourselves as only separate physical entities. I tend to think what we really are, at the core, is that vast cosmic consciousness.

This line of thought is actually being explored by some very sharp scientists. Physicists, neurologists, molecular biologists, etc... The fathers of quantum mechanics also pondered the mystery of consciousness' and observations' interactions with experiments at the most fundamental levels.

Perhaps Eckhart Tolle explains it better...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rFs1sx8CNo

Yep, going to continue disagreeing and maintain that my relationships with others have lent themselves to who I am, there my relationships with them are my most important.

with God. My daughter and husband, my mother, myself.

I'm not even disagreeing with you TTMI.

If you read between the lines of what I've posted, it's one in the same. At the most fundamental level we are all one in the same.

Perhaps it's a 'what came first, the chicken or the egg' scenario? The mind is want to measure, quantify, order and place things in their 'proper' context in space and time.

For me the better I understand myself, the better I understand others, and at the same time I see myself in others, learning more about myself, and in turn them.

So for me it started within and expanded outward and was then reflected back to me. For others could it be the reverse? I'll leave that for you to decide, because in the end it really only matters for you.

:-)

Priority changes for me, most important is the one that needs my attention, others going smooth are okay. I can't truly put all focus on myself when something is hurting important relationship, how can I be at peace with myself? All relationships are important, I think, because one depends on the other.

While it's easy to say "with myself", or "with God", it IS nice to have a barometer, a sounding board for our feelings, in the flesh.

At the moment, my closest relationship is with a buddy (yes, him, he who I had an argument with when he caught me in a bad mood and I said some hurtful things to) who is a bit disorganized/scattered/all over the map in his thinking and a bit clingy/needy/demanding, more than any woman I know, but has a lot of interesting perspectives, and whom I tend to agree pretty well in terms of aesthetic sensibilities, about life, politics, movies, etc., so it's nice to have a buddy.

No relationship is going to be perfect. In fact, relationships are downright messy. It's a question of whether a relationship is HEALTHY, whether it brings peace and comfort, or whether it brings stress. I'm kinda on the fence about this. My relationship with my buddy brings both, or either, depending on the time, the situation, what kind of mood we catch each other in.